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Tag Archives: premarital

I started writing what I thought was an intelligent post showing how blog publishing rates mirror the diminished sex life of married couples post the Honeymoon period, and searched for Outlook’s famed sex surveys.

Maybe I would have done some regression analysis, y-axis showing coital frequency per month and x-axis representing time.

But I forgot all about that when I found this: the Geography of Sex. It’s not as interesting as it sounds. But within it was this innocuous, stat-filled paragraph that most percentage-fearing people would have skipped: (you can skip it too, actually)

India is obviously less a dating society than the US. But the atlas points to a survey that suggests that in India 79 per cent of male students surveyed supported pre-marital sex for men but only 58 per cent supported it for women. At the same time 60 per cent of female students did not think they had to marry before having sex. In the US girls begin to date at an average age of 12 or 13, and boys at 13 or 14 years. Only 47 per cent of women surveyed in 21 countries would choose their current husband or boyfriend as their perfect date. But dating, if the survey is to be believed, is not all about sexual liberation. It has its flip side: one in five women in the US become victims of date rape. In Britain and Germany more than 70 per cent of women under 20 have sex outside marriage; more than half of all married men under 20 have sex outside marriage.

Concentrate on the second sentence. Only 58% male Indian students supported pre-marital sex for women as opposed to 79% who supported PM Sex. (Can’t really shorten it to PMS, can I? This also has the advantage of possibly roping in innocent googlers who were just searching for some Prime Ministerial porn. Which reminds me, will a scandalous clip of our PM be called MMS MMS?) What about the 21% who find that it’s okay for a guy to have PM Sex but not for a woman? (Assuming that all those who were okay with women having PM Sex were okay with guys having it too.) Surely they are God-fearing and against women having multiple partners. Don’t cite the Mahabharata here; Draupadi was married. Does it then mean that they are ok with ‘fraternal kissing‘ a la Brezhnev and Honecker? (The two weren’t married.)

Sacrificing that one percentage point at the altar of rounding-off, we can then safely conclude that one in five Indian male students is gay. To hell with sampling errors, EPW wouldn’t publish this anyway.